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Last October, Bari Weiss—best known as a contrarian opinion writer who launched the right-leaning Free Press—was appointed the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Donald Trump has called her new regime “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone wrote about Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS News for the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. In a conversation with David Remnick, Malone discusses her reporting on Weiss: how resigning from the New York Times launched Weiss to prominence as a crusader against what she has characterized as woke groupthink; how Weiss gained the support of Silicon Valley titans who had their own political grievances; and the headlines about Weiss’s rocky beginning as head of a news network, including the on-air travails of her new anchor Tony Dokoupil.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Tucker Carlson has long been a standard-bearer for far-right views, such as the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” He recently did a chatty interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler. And yet, Carlson started out as a respected, well-connected, albeit contrarian, political journalist. Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, talks with David Remnick about his new book, “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.” They trace how Carlson’s sense of personal resentment toward the establishment grew; how launching his own website radicalized his politics in the years before MAGA; and his political ambitions as a potential heir to Donald Trump. “I think, if Tucker Carlson concludes that J. D. Vance can’t get elected President, maybe he has to do it himself,” Zengerle says. “So much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer. And Tucker does those things very well. . . . I think our politics are at a place where that really doesn’t seem as outrageous as it would have even just a couple years ago.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Shortly after 7 P.M. on Wednesday, January 14th, Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, received a call at home from his police chief, Brian O’Hara. “ICE shot somebody again,” O’Hara said. Minneapolis was in the midst of an unprecedented influx of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It had been a week since one of them, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, throwing the city into a state of fear and havoc. Frey had just changed into “soft pants,” thinking he might have a night at home with his wife and two daughters. Instead, he listened as O’Hara described the details of another shooting. Federal agents had pursued a man, later identified by ICE as a Venezuelan named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in a highway chase on I-94. Sosa-Celis eventually crashed on a street in North Minneapolis, exited his vehicle, and, amid some kind of tussle with federal agents, was shot in the leg. He then ran into a nearby house, where a woman inside had what O’Hara described as “an anxiety attack.” “Get ICE out of there,” Frey told him. Federal agents were still outside the home. Sosa-Celis had not received medical attention, and was refusing to come out. “I was really frustrated,” Frey told me recently. “I mean, one, they just shot somebody. And, two, their presence will only further inflame the situation.”

O’Hara drove to the house. ICE agents were there, and a crowd was forming. At one point, people shot off fireworks and threw chunks of ice and rocks at police officers. ICE agents tear-gassed the crowd. One of the cannisters rolled beneath a car, filling it with gas. Children emerged, including a six-month-old baby, who was carried out with his eyes closed and apparently unconscious. “The cops had to go through this angry, pissed-off crowd to try to get the child to bring it to the ambulance,” O’Hara said. Frey put on a suit and returned to City Hall, where a now familiar emergency protocol was unfolding. Across Minneapolis, off-duty police were being called back to work. Later that night, in front of television cameras, Frey described what has become a surreal status quo for the city. “We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security has described what is unfolding in Minneapolis as the largest operation in the agency’s history. About three thousand agents are now estimated to be in the area. They outnumber the city’s police officers by five to one. In a lawsuit filed against the Trump Administration, Minnesota officials describe a city overtaken by roving packs of ICE agents who approach “random people,” largely, it seems, “based on race and ethnicity.” D.H.S. has said that these actions target criminals, and that, if law enforcement and local officials collaborated with ICE, “the violent riots wouldn’t exist.” In response to protests, and to the “corrupt politicians” who support them, President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Immigrants in the area, including the mayor of St. Paul, are now carrying their passports whenever they leave their homes. According to Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a six-week span, agents have arrested three thousand people. There are reports that troops from Alaska’s 11th Airborne Division, who have been trained for cold-weather operations, are on standby to descend on Minneapolis. Protesters roam the streets, warning immigrants of ICE’s presence. They have been met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Agents have been recorded saying things like “This is your warning,” and “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?,” and, in the case of the agent who shot Good, “Fucking bitch.”

On the receiving end of the federal government’s effort is Frey, who governs Minneapolis with a staff of fifteen people. His office has no uniform way of tracking ICE, beyond 911 calls, documentation from activists, and messages from civilians. These messages include people saying, “ICE is outside my home,” and death threats against Frey and his staff, along with more mundane requests for trash pickup. The only way to separate the urgent from the non-urgent is by hand. The one aide who does so can get through about three hundred messages in a day, if he spends his entire day doing it. In the first ten days after Good’s death, the office received fifteen thousand messages. “We are underwater,” John Freude, the mayor’s public-safety adviser, told me.

The Minneapolis Police Department is also at a breaking point. In the four days after Good’s shooting, the department tracked nearly fourteen thousand hours of overtime—which cost the city almost two million dollars. The department has recorded nine injuries to police officers as a result of D.H.S. activity. One officer’s eye was cut by a shard of glass from a broken window; two officers were hit with chunks of ice and concussed. O’Hara worries about his officers’ mental health, especially for those who worked in 2020, during the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “This is triggering for a lot of these officers,” O’Hara said. Meanwhile, federal agents have been wearing generic tactical gear, including vests displaying the word “POLICE,” causing confusion about which law-enforcement officers can be trusted. This is what Minneapolis has become: a city invaded by its own federal government, run by a mayor with no power to stop it.

Two days after the shooting of Sosa-Celis, I met Frey at the day-care center where he drops off his daughters in the mornings. Frey is forty-four, with a compact, runner’s body. He has the look of a tailored politician, but his manner is more offbeat. He has run through the streets in jorts at a pride parade, done a goofy dance at a Somali festival, and, in a sudden burst of frustration, exclaimed, of what ICE is doing, “It’s so stupid!” Other times, he can be quite serious. At child-care centers around the city, “ICE watchers” now stand outside in neon vests, on the lookout for agents. At Frey’s day-care center, a woman watched the door closely. “See ya, bubs,” Frey told his five-year-old before he left.

Back in his car, Frey told me, “There’s multiple truths taking place in the city at the same time.” He described purchasing a scone at a café the day before, and then seeing a person who looked Latino emerge from the back of the shop, apparently crying. Another layer was playing out online, in the form of viral videos. “There’s thousands of them,” he said. That morning, Frey had seen a post about federal agents who had eaten at a Mexican restaurant a couple hours outside of Minneapolis, before returning later the same day to make arrests. “It’s so evil, I initially questioned whether it was true or not,” he said. “How can you do that?”

Frey drove to the state Senate building, across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, where Democratic members of Congress were hosting a shadow hearing about ICE activity in Minnesota. Frey was set to testify. Sitting outside, he learned that the hearing would begin only after several speeches, and the speeches wouldn’t begin for another thirty minutes. He became agitated at the thought of spending so long in St. Paul, ten miles from his city. “I don’t know, man,” he told an aide. “I don’t want to not be there. In Minneapolis.” The street outside was quiet. His team hadn’t yet heard of any ICE activity in the city that morning. “But yeah,” Frey said. “It’s happening. Right now. I’m certain.”

The latest version of Trump’s immigration enforcement began seven months ago, when he sent ICE into Los Angeles. Home Depots were raided, and people were disappeared off the streets. By the time agents arrived in Chicago, three months later, the country was accustomed to seeing images of protesters wearing gas masks. ICE actions began to take on more overt elements of stagecraft. Gregory Bovino, a commander-at-large of the Border Patrol, has toured cities on foot, followed by cameras and surrounded by masked agents. The operations were given names: Operation Midway Blitz, in Chicago; Operation Catahoula Crunch, in New Orleans; Operation Charlotte’s Web, in Charlotte. In Minneapolis, it’s Operation Metro Surge. D.H.S. routinely publishes the mug shots and names of those charged with a crime—“the worst of the worst.” The threat now hangs over other Democratic officials that Trump might, at any time, turn their cities into war zones. “It’s a blue state with a blue mayor, and a blue governor,” Frey told me. “It’s a performance. It’s a very dangerous performance.”

Frey grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. His parents were professional ballet dancers who later ran a chiropractor’s office together. Frey went to law school and became an employment and civil-rights attorney. He also spent time as a professional runner, and when he visited Minneapolis, in 2006, for a marathon, he has recalled thinking, “Yeah, I could live here.” He became the mayor in 2018, at thirty-six. Two and a half years later, a police officer killed George Floyd, prompting nationwide protests. “Then you had a global pandemic, and people had cabin fever, and everybody had masks, and so there’s the whole anonymity associated with that, and you had a hundred years in the making reckoning around social justice,” Frey said. Buildings burned to the ground; businesses were looted.

Frey found himself at the center of a fraught conversation about how to be a good white ally. In June, 2020, at Floyd’s memorial service, he knelt before the casket and wept. Two days later, at an outdoor rally, he was asked to commit to abolishing the police department. With hundreds of people standing around him, many filming on their phones, he said no. Video of the moment went viral. Frey, wearing a face mask printed with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE,” was booed out of the event. “Go home, Jacob. Go home,” people chanted as he walked out. “Shame.” In the weeks and months that followed, Frey found himself speaking from a place of fear. “I was very scripted, because I was worried I was gonna step on a land mine,” he told me. “You lose who you are. It’s literally not your words.”

Frey’s theory of how the operation in Minneapolis began goes like this: “I think somebody from pretty high up in the federal Administration said, ‘Go to Minneapolis and get a bunch of Somalis and deport them,’ and then nobody really pushed back, and then they get here only to figure out, They’re all citizens,” Frey said. “They’ve been here for longer than I’ve been here.” Trump became fixated on Minnesota after investigations into alleged social-services fraud in the state. Members of the Somali community have been charged as a result of the investigations. In December, Trump referred to the Somali community as “garbage.” Days later, D.H.S. announced a surge of agents to the city. But the vast majority of Somali people in Minnesota are citizens. Frey believes that agents have now diverted their attention to the Latino community. Minnesota’s estimated undocumented population, according to the latest available data from the Pew Research Center, ranks behind that of twenty-three other states, making it a small target for such a large operation.

The Minneapolis left also helped make the city a preoccupation of the Trump Administration. “The groups are a bit better organized. They’ve got some excellent communications,” Bovino, the commander-at-large, said during a press conference, almost admiringly. “It’s that collusion and corruption between elected officials and these anarchists.” This time around, Frey has been less timid. Speaking after Good’s death, Frey told ICE, “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here.” When D.H.S. blamed Good for her own death, he said that that was “bullshit.”

Later in the day, I drove with Frey to Cedar-Riverside, one of the city’s Somali neighborhoods. At the center stand the concrete towers of the Riverside Plaza housing project, where many Somali families move when they first arrive. Normally, the area would be full of people, but the streets were empty. The cafés and restaurants were empty, too. Inside Sagal Restaurant & Coffee, Frey bought sambusas. The woman behind the counter said that she was carrying her U.S. passport. “Nobody has control,” she said. “We lost control.”

In another restaurant, four men sat in a booth, talking about ICE. They said that agents had already visited this restaurant, and others on the same block. Frey tried to say “hang tough” in Somali, with the help of a member of his protective detail, pronouncing it twice before giving up. “Yeah, whatever,” he said, laughing. He’d been trying to learn the same phrase in Spanish, though he said the translation he’d been using from Google was receiving confused looks in response. “Hang tough,” Frey said in English as he left. Out on the street, past graffiti that read “FUCK ICE,” a light snow was falling. Two ICE watchers in neon vests stood in the cold.

Frey has received almost no information from the federal government. He still hoped to set up a conversation with Trump, to negotiate an end to the siege. He was working “different channels.” When Frey returned to City Hall, he learned that Trump had tweeted about him. His chief of staff, Grace Waltz, began to read the post aloud. “ ‘The governor and the mayor don’t know what to do. They have totally lost control,’ ” she said. “ ‘And’—he says ‘our’; I think he meant a-r-e—‘our currently being rendered useless. If and when I’m forced to act, it will be solved quickly and effectively.’ ”

That afternoon, the Mayor sat down at a conference-room table where his team had been gathering daily—sometimes three times a day—for a “sitrep,” or situation report. Nine other officials sat around the table, and the police chief’s face appeared on a screen. O’Hara read the latest accounts of ICE activity. There were reports of ICE agents outside a Target on Lake Street, of a 911 caller saying he feared he was being followed by two suspicious vehicles, of federal agents on the property of a school at 6:45 A.M., of men wearing vests and masks, of two Dodge Durangos with tinted windows and no license plates circling a neighborhood, and of a bomb threat at a university in Cedar-Riverside that had been accused of “harboring illegals.” Agents seemed to be swarming the north side, where Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis had been shot in the leg two days earlier. “You can assume that it’s some sort of response to the incident this week,” O’Hara said, though, of course, that was only a guess.

Department heads took turns giving their own reports of a transformed city. One said that one of her team members “has had ICE camped outside of his house for the last two days.” Another said that the city was planning on releasing vehicles left in the street during arrests back to their owners at no cost. The head of Public Works said that the department was running trash pickup at the site of Good’s death three times a day, trying to keep it “tidy.” “Graffiti abatement” was under way. “But I did hear some of our crews are getting harassed,” the department head said. “We told them, ‘Just leave the site and come back.’ ” It wasn’t good washing weather, anyway, because of low temperatures. “We’re continuing to battle ice on the street,” he said.

“Frozen water,” someone clarified.

Most of the meeting was spent on plans for the following day. At 1 P.M., a right-wing influencer and live streamer named Jake Lang was promising to burn a Quran on the steps of City Hall, and then lead an “anti-fraud” march to Cedar-Riverside. Lang had been charged with assaulting police during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He had since been pardoned by Trump. Late last year, Lang organized a large anti-Islam march in Dearborn, Michigan. O’Hara was reviewing the extensive planning that his office had completed. It had assembled a team of speciality police officers, dialogue officers, violence interrupters, attorneys, physicians, and civilians who had been asked to do “crowd calming” and to “dissuade people from coming out at all.” Police were preparing for the possibility of protesters from outside the Twin Cities who might “come in armed.” Another aide noted that the police seemed to be “on the front lines of trying to avoid a civil war.”

O’Hara came to Minneapolis from Newark, New Jersey, in 2022, to help reform the department after Floyd’s killing. With federal agents on the streets, he felt that the city’s immigrant community was more trusting than ever of the police department. But in other parts of the city the presence of ICE was aggravating existing antipathy for local law enforcement.

ICE agents were also calling 911 themselves. Some called with complaints about protesters. Others drove to the police precinct while being followed by ICE watchers, and then demanded that the activists be arrested. What O’Hara notices most when he watches videos of ICE activity is how undisciplined it is. In one, agents surround a car belonging to Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen. One agent opens the back-seat door as the car begins to move; another shatters her passenger-side window. At one point, an agent puts his entire upper body through the open driver’s-seat window, with Rahman still behind the wheel. Eventually, she is yanked from the car while still tangled in her seat belt. “I’m disabled,” she screams, as two agents take out knives and begin to saw through the seat belt from different directions. “I don’t know how anyone in charge can see that and think it is safe,” O’Hara said.

In Minneapolis, police-department policy prohibits officers from assisting in any federal immigration enforcement, including by providing crowd management solely at the request of D.H.S. But activists have asked why local law enforcement isn’t doing more to stop agents. “You’re gonna let them do this?” a man who’d just been exposed to tear gas yelled at a group of state troopers. “Are you not our people?” Frey has heard activists say that the local police should find ground to arrest ICE agents. Frey believes this would be legally difficult. And, in any case, all he could see were nightmare hypotheticals playing out. “You think they’re going to go willingly?” he asked.

By the next day, Frey had learned that he was being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly conspiring, along with Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, to obstruct federal agents. With this news came a several-minute period of self-questioning. “You start spinning,” he said. “What could I have possibly done, unbeknownst to me? What can they twist? What could somebody, with less than just intentions, interpret here? But then you realize: no, this is just ridiculous.” It was another moment of dark unreality. For days, he had felt the Trump Administration coming after the city that he was in charge of keeping safe. Now he was being personally targeted by his own federal government. He began asking what sort of legal-defense fund he might need.

On the afternoon of the protest, I arrived early at City Hall to find a modest number of counter-protesters holding anti-ICE signs. Around noon, Lang arrived with a group of supporters carrying banners and flags. Lang wore a camouflage vest and, in a backpack slung over his shoulder, he carried a portable loudspeaker connected to a handheld microphone. “Send the Somalis back,” he said. “Do you not understand you’re being replaced?” He paced up the street, then retraced his steps, live-streaming as he walked and praising “white Christian men.”

Within moments, a small crowd of counter-protesters encircled him. A person concealed by a hood and gas mask grabbed one of the wires hanging from Lang’s bag. On the outskirts of the crowd, fights broke out between protesters and counter-protesters. “Fuck you!” a Lang supporter said. A counter-protester replied, “You support a fucking Nazi.” Through the speaker, Lang’s voice washed over the noise: “Send them back. ICE, ICE, baby.” A sudden, sharp crack sounded in the street. It was the sound of clapboard hitting the pavement, as counter-protesters smashed and kicked one of Lang’s banners. Another man reached through the crowd to push Lang. On the edge of the scrum, a counter-protester was trying to de-escalate. “Do not give him what he wants!” he yelled. He looked behind him. “Where are the fucking police?”

After an hour, the crowd of counter-protesters grew to several hundred. They pinned Lang against the wall of City Hall. He climbed into a recessed windowsill several feet above the ground and continued to live-stream from there. Counter-protesters threw water balloons at him over the heads of the crowd, soaking his clothes with cold water. A man with his own speaker played the soundtrack to Disney’s “Frozen.” I could no longer hear what Lang was saying. Several men climbed into the windowsill with him, blocking him from view. Video later showed Lang with a gash on the back of his head. “I was almost ripped LIMB FROM LIMB!!!” he tweeted.

Around 1:15 P.M., Lang toppled out of the window and hit the ground, perhaps pulled by the crowd. Then he was moving again, down the street to the Hotel Indigo. He ran inside and escaped out a back exit. Counter-protesters tried to follow, but most were locked out before they could enter. Inside, a worker in the lobby tried to assure them that the hotel did not serve Nazis. “We absolutely do not,” he said. “I would be out there with you, but I have to take care of my guests. Please leave.”

The march never made it to Cedar-Riverside, the Somali neighborhood. The area remained calm. No armed protesters. No reports of property damage. The only injury that Frey’s team was made aware of had been Lang’s own, but by the time they tried to see if he needed medical attention he had left town.

“This could have been a disaster,” Frey said, early the next morning. We were at a TV studio downtown, where Frey was taping a series of Sunday-show interviews. During the interviews, Frey spoke again about the “occupying force that has quite literally invaded our city.” He asked people to imagine how this might feel if it happened to their own town.

One of the eerie things about ICE’s presence in Minneapolis is the way it can be felt without being seen. Outside, more snow was falling. At City Hall, more e-mails were piling up. More 911 calls were being placed. Trash pickups would soon be under way again at the site of Good’s death. More people would be taken away. On the wall of the studio, footage of protests played on a monitor. On another, Frey was trying to put words to what feels like to be in the city. As a mayor, maybe this was all he could do.

After his third television hit, Frey emerged from the studio. Grace Waltz, his chief of staff, said that the way he’d handled a question at the end of the interview was “really good.” “Was it?” Frey said, pleased. “What did I say?” Waltz scanned the notes she’d been taking on her phone. But Frey thought he remembered. “I said, ‘This is wild,’ ” he said. “ ‘This is wild.’ ” ♦

It’s a credit to Louise Bourgeois that her art can still surprise. For much of her career, the French-born, New York-based artist showed only sporadically—until the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective, in 1982, when she was seventy. After that, and especially since her death, in 2010, Bourgeois has become a household name, and her art a familiar presence. Yet even acolytes of her psychologically freighted sculptures, drawings, and prints may find new revelation in “Gathering Wool,” an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (through April 18) focussed on her late abstractions.

Installation view of “Gathering Wool,” from 1990.

Art work by Louise Bourgeois / © the Easton Foundation / VAGA / ARS / Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; Photograph by Thomas Barratt

The first room provides the show’s aesthetic apex. It’s dominated by the huge installation “Twosome” (1991), in which a black tank hums while slowly moving in and out of a larger one, with a flashing red light inside. A nearby screen plays a clip, from a 1978 performance, of Suzan Cooper strutting among Bourgeois’s sculptures and gutturally singing a song about being abandoned. The themes here are classically Bourgeoisian—human interdependence and the difficulty of uncoupling—but the contrast of austere kineticism with raw emotion is unusual and enthralling.

The exhibition proceeds more typically from there, with a series of evocative pieces on the darkened ground floor, including the titular installation, from 1990: seven oversized wooden balls that seem to be gathered in conversation before a metal screen. Upstairs, in a limited exhibit (closing Jan. 24), the tone changes again, as more modest sculptures and works on paper are scattered across the light-filled fifth floor. The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates.

Since the implosion of his wry alt-rap group Das Racist, which stood as a testament to the blog-era internet’s megaphonic power, the Queens rapper Himanshu Suri, or Heems, has carved out a more serious career offline. In addition to Swet Shop Boys, his project with the actor Riz Ahmed and the English producer Redinho, and a gig at N.Y.U. Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute, Heems’s music as a soloist has unpacked intersectional identity, probing the Indo-Gothamite experience with clear eyes, a biting disposition, and an easygoing wit. He still knows his way around a joke, but on such albums as “Lafandar” and “Veena” he expands the scope of the hip-hop ego.—Sheldon Pearce (Baby’s All Right; Jan. 31.)

For her feature-film directorial début, “The Chronology of Water,” Kristen Stewart adapts Lidia Yuknavitch’s eponymous 2011 memoir and renders the author’s intense subjectivity with a rare creative fury. The drama carries Lidia through a traumatic childhood and sexual abuse by her father (Michael Epp), her departure for college, a marriage, a stillbirth, a time of erotic hedonism, and the awakening of her literary vocation by the writer and teacher Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). Stewart conjures Lidia’s complex inner life with agitated images and a bold editing scheme that flashes back and ahead. The adolescent and adult Lidia is played, by Imogen Poots, with passionate commitment; her desperate quest for a place in the world—and the liberating, redemptive power of writing—comes through ferociously.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Sudan Archives.

Photograph by Aaron Parsons

Initially, Brittany Parks was defined primarily by her violin. The singer-songwriter, who goes by the name Sudan Archives, treated the instrument through which she studied ethnomusicology as a kind of aesthetic signifier, even when she became a mainstay in L.A.’s beat-music community in the mid-twenty-tens. In recent years, that signifier has transformed into a talisman, the engine powering a wide-ranging multidisciplinary songcraft that encompasses R. & B. and soul, hip-hop and electro, house and techno. Her 2025 album, “The BPM,” is her most liberated and ambitious LP in a career characterized by radical moves; the artist uses her alter ego to turn her multi-instrumentalism into a personality diagnostic.—S.P. (Webster Hall; Jan. 29.)

Have you ever sat through the movie “Whiplash” and somehow thought, What if this had more jazz? Look no further, for the Town Hall has just the thing to satisfy. An eighteen-piece jazz band will play the soundtrack live, while Damien Chazelle’s masterpiece of stress screens onstage. You’ve seen sweat detonate off Miles Teller as he rumbles out “Caravan,” and now you might be able to feel it, too—courtesy of the drummer Greyson Nekrutman, a member of the Brazilian heavy-metal band Sepultura. The film’s composer, Justin Hurwitz, conducts, hopefully with less verve for torture than J. K. Simmons had. Jury’s still out on how far the band will take it—it might be helpful to have a medic, or a therapist, on site.—Jane Bua (Town Hall; Jan. 31.)

Noche Flamenca.

Photograph by Steven Pisano

In recent years, Noche Flamenca, New York’s finest flamenco troupe, has been taking inspiration from the art of Francisco Goya. The company’s aesthetic of bare-bones authenticity and banked-fire passion matches the painter’s dark candor. Situations and moods from Goya prompt and color the troupe’s usual loose collections of ensemble numbers and solos for its excellent dancers (among them Jesús Helmo and Paula Bolaños) and its transcendent star, Soledad Barrio. The troupe’s latest program, “Irrationalities,” joins Goya with a touch of Fellini and Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis.” The ancient Greek playwright is another kindred spirit for Noche Flamenca, which presented a revelatory version of “Antigone” a decade ago.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 27-Feb. 8.)

In his later years, in the nineteen-fifties, the director Max Ophüls, who fled his native Germany when Hitler took power, developed one of the most instantly recognizable—and one of the most sophisticated—cinematic styles, based on elaborate tracking shots jointly choreographed for camera and actors. Metrograph’s twelve-film retrospective of his work includes these mature masterworks (a highlight is the Maupassant adaptation “Le Plaisir”) and his Hollywood films of the forties (such as “Letter from an Unknown Woman”). The selections range back to the start of his career, in the nineteen-thirties, with such films as “The Company’s in Love”—a bittersweet inside-the-movie-business comedy (screening in a new remastering) that he made in Germany, in 1932—and the dazzlingly inventive French romantic comedy “The Tender Enemy,” which is also a ghost story.—R.B. (Jan. 24-March 1.)

Illustration by Doug Salati

1. Last year, I finally got a car—after living in New York City for twenty years without one—and one of the marvellous benefits is being able to spend more time exploring strange and mystical areas upstate. It is no surprise to me that the region, with its misty, mountainous terrain, has given rise to many oddball communities, both utopian and nefarious. I recently binged the new podcast “Allison After NXIVM,” a CBC show that features in-depth interviews with the actress Allison Mack, who did jail time for her involvement with the abusive upstate cult run by the con man Keith Raniere. The podcast is a fascinating artifact, the tale of a woman still untangling her role as both victim and victimizer.

2. On a less sinister note, I loved Mona Fastvold’s new film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” so much that I saw it three times in a week. It tells the story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), an illiterate Englishwoman who founded the American Shaker movement, from a commune called Niskayuna, on the Hudson River. It’s a gorgeous achievement—full of music, ecstatic dance, and true believers hollering in the woods.

3. I have continued down the Shaker rabbit hole since seeing the film, reading every book about the group that I can find. So far, my favorite is Chris Jennings’s “Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism,” from 2016, which charts the paths of five kooky dreamers who founded (often ill-fated) experimental communities in the American wilderness.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• The phantom of the wedding reception
• The so-called “Australia effect”
• What it’s like to be a parent of a baby actor

There’s history wherever you look, but it takes a filmmaker’s eye and ear to extract its substance from beneath its surface, which is what Suzannah Herbert does in “Natchez,” her new documentary. Natchez, a Mississippi River town of about fourteen thousand residents, is popular with tourists, who come to see its meticulously restored antebellum houses, especially during a pair of annual “pilgrimages” featuring guided tours that are long on nostalgia and short on history. From 2022 to 2024, Herbert filmed several such tours, often led by the homeowners themselves, most of whom are white, including some who can trace their family’s occupancy to before the Civil War. She also filmed Natchez tours led by Black residents of the area, who tell stories very different from those of their white counterparts, offering correctives to the town’s sanitized mythology of itself. By way of these divergent perspectives, Herbert’s film not only identifies local social fractures but also reflects a national moment when white rage is ascendant and the President has issued an executive order (with the Orwellian title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”) that has led to the bowdlerization of National Park Service exhibits and websites involving slavery.

“Natchez,” a wide-ranging mosaic of cinematic portraiture, bears out a strange truth about nonfiction filmmaking: it’s as much a matter of casting as fiction is. The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them. The events that Herbert films are undated; the movie only hints at chronology, and its dramatic arc is a surprising one, revealing a change of consciousness by way of changes of circumstance. From the start, the filmmaker, working with the editor Pablo Proenza, establishes two main characters, both born in 1964: Tracy McCartney, a white woman who volunteers at a lavishly restored house called Choctaw Hall, greeting people while wearing a nineteenth-century-style hoop skirt, and Tracy Collins, a Black man who is the pastor of a Baptist church and also gives tours of the town, driving visitors around in his passenger van.

At Choctaw Hall, McCartney tells guests how the tradition she’s a part of got started: the town, made wealthy by cotton, suffered a boll-weevil infestation in the early nineteen-hundreds and gradually fell on hard times. Seeing venerable houses in disrepair, a pair of women’s volunteer groups founded in the late twenties—the Natchez Garden Club and the Pilgrimage Garden Club—launched the preservation mission and inaugurated the tours. Collins, who goes by the nickname of Rev, expressly states that his program is to “violate some Southern-pride narratives with truths and facts.” On his tours, he says, “You can’t talk about cotton without talking about slaves.” At one point in the film, McCartney, who has just got divorced and can no longer afford to volunteer as a guide, joins one of Rev’s tours and hears him talk about Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and ongoing forms of white supremacy. “He said some things that made me think about it a little bit differently,” she says.

Rev displays the rhetorical power, leavened with humor and warmth, of a skilled public speaker, but many others are charismatic, too. There’s Deborah Cosey, the first Black member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club—who says that the garden clubs had long been “slaps in the face to the African American community”—and the owner of an antebellum house known as the Concord Quarters. An unadorned brick building, it housed enslaved people and has a kitchen where many of them once worked. Cosey was formerly a guide at a historic inn in the town and was ordered to “stick to the script” when she insisted on mentioning the inn’s slave quarters; today, as she says, “I wrote my own script.” There’s David Garner, an elderly white homeowner and guide who is also a brazen and unabashed racist, using the N-word on tours, even after being “reprimanded” for “inappropriate words” and forced to censor himself by the “hoop-skirt mafia.” Garner is gay and claims that “half” of the historic-home owners are gay men, the only people, he says, with “the money and the taste” to maintain the properties. Rev, who’s been on Garner’s tours, wonders whether Garner is merely “trying to portray a Southern aristocratic gentleman, how they would talk.” He adds, “Maybe you can see if there’s a real him or is that the real him?”

White tourists describe visiting these sumptuous, old-fashioned properties as a way to “get away from current events,” and the film’s poised cinematography, by Noah Collier, captures the enveloping allure of these pristinely preserved grand dwellings. But current events are inextricable from the subject of “Natchez,” perhaps all the more so in the months since the movie premièred, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The federal government is a conspicuous presence in the film, because the National Park Service owns an antebellum house, and a ranger who works there, Barney Schoby, goes into great detail regarding the daily lives of people who were enslaved, including how knowledge that some surreptitiously gleaned during their labors helped them prosper under Reconstruction. The N.P.S. also owns another Natchez site, called Forks of the Road, which, for a time, was the second-largest American slave market. The N.P.S. is attempting to purchase all the former land of the market in order to turn it into one of the country’s principal slave-market museums—but the owners of some sites don’t want to sell, and one, a white man named Gene Williams, is derisive about the project.

The person mainly responsible for the Forks of the Road preservation and historical research, according to Schoby, is an elderly Black man named Ser Boxley. Boxley, seen all too briefly onscreen, is one of the most extraordinary presences in the recent cinema. He describes his activism in mystical terms: “The enslaved ancestors here asked the question, Who is going to tell their story? And I said I would.” An unnamed white ranger who openly seeks to end the whitewashing of history says, “I see him as a Biblical prophet,” someone who is “pointing out to the status quo that they were not fulfilling their mission of justice.” The grandeur of Boxley’s influence is conveyed by his terse, oracular speech. When Cosey first met him, in a store, he mentioned her purchase of the Concord Quarters and said, simply, “These buildings are worthy of preservation.” To watch Herbert’s film is like watching a report on a place that has subsequently been besieged. It’s hard to imagine the N.P.S., under the Trump Administration, advancing the educational program that’s on heroic view in “Natchez.” Herbert may have preserved more history than she ever expected.

The power of governments to replace education with indoctrination is the subject of another remarkable new documentary, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which likewise features characters who, at the end of filming, are at risk. It’s a first-person narrative relating the experiences and observations of Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, who, as a videographer at a school in the Russian town of Karabash, about a thousand miles east of Moscow, was directly affected by his country’s invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Quickly, the school received directives “from above” requiring teachers to install a new “patriotic” curriculum and students to perform nationalistic songs and speeches—all of which Talankin had to record on video, as proof that the school was following orders. Talankin, an independent-minded opponent of the war, who had turned his office into a “pillar of democracy” where students could gather and speak freely, submitted a letter of resignation.

Soon after, however, he made online contact with David Borenstein, an American filmmaker based in Denmark, who wanted to document the war’s impact on daily life in Russia. Talankin, realizing that history was unfolding before his eyes, promptly withdrew his resignation. Now he could fulfill his official duties—recording marches, flag-waving parades, grenade-throwing competitions, and educational visits from Wagner Group mercenaries—while also amassing footage for Borenstein. In the film, he reflects wryly that he is no longer just a videographer but also a film director.

Talankin bears witness to the conscription of young men and mourns the combat deaths of some of them, and he ruefully recognizes the effectiveness of propaganda. With dogma filling school days, students aren’t being educated and are left intellectually unprepared for much but obedience. He hears President Vladimir Putin declaring, on TV, “Teachers win wars,” and redefining opposition as treason. When Talankin notices a police car parked at his apartment building, he decides to leave Russia. Pretending merely to go on vacation, he takes with him much more footage for Borenstein to assemble. The result, featuring a copious voice-over by Talankin, is an exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” relentlessly dramatizes its most exceptional aspect—the very fact that it was made. ♦